Wow, 149 comments and not a single one modded up about actual gameplay?

I'll go first - it's a pretty fun game. It's a squad based top-down shooter based on the Source engine. Multiplayer using either shared or dedicated servers. You choose one of 4 roles - Commander, Special Weapons, Tech, or Medic. There can be more than one Medic for example, but most missions require at least one Tech to hack open doors.

You choose your weapon load-outs and characters/roles and enter the mission. You can carry two main weapons and one off-hand weapon. Some of the main weapons are unique to the character type - for example only Special Weapons can carry an auto-gun, and only a Medic can carry a medic gun, and some are available to all players. As you complete missions you gain XP and levels, which unlocks additional weapons. The levels are account specific, not character specific - for example I can get to level 9 playing as Special Weapons, which unlocks the Medic gun, and then I can switch to Medic so I can actually use it.

The controls are fairly simple - W,A,S,D for up/down/left/right, and the mouse controls aim/firing, but since it's top-down you do have to aim in 3d space - you can aim close or far away. Friendly fire does happen with all but a couple weapons so you need to be careful not to hurt your teammates.

Aliens swarm from almost everywhere - I guess that's how it got the name. They do come from creative places - climbing up from hatches in the floor, jumping down from the ceiling up above, climbing walls and tunnels. You can never be sure where they will come from. The missions seem to be mostly linear objectives, like gain access to this area, go here, destroy the alien biomass, escape, etc. and are filled with choreographed sequences of alien battles to keep you on your toes. If you stay too long in one area you will start to get random alien attacks as well, so it's not 100% choreographed/scripted.

There are only about 7 or 8 missions in the game, and a group of friends and I were able to complete all of them on Normal mode in a few hours last night. We got to level 10 or so and unlocked a lot of weapons in doing so. I guess now the only thing to do is play it on Hard modes or wait until they release more maps/content.

Some standouts: Your off-hand weapons are very unique and can be used for tactical advantage. For example, you can get combat flares that increase auto-aim effectiveness when dropped, hornet swarm missiles that are heat seeking, even adrenaline that makes the game go into slow motion - which has to be the coolest effect. In slow motion everything goes into The Matrix-like mode where you have tons of time to aim and line up your shots. The game also does it at certain times on it's own just for dramatic effect.

Conclusion: A fun but short game - it will be interesting to see what type of content the mod-community creates for it. The squad-based tactics can be surprisingly deep if you have a good group of players on voice communication. Definitely worth a download for at least an afternoon or evening of fun with 3 friends.

is that Verizon will be the first one out of the gate with Block C 700MHz LTE service -- which will put them on the spot: they are *required by the terms of the license* -- thanks, Google -- to allow any device that meets their published tech specs to connect to that network.

That sounds really awesome, but what happens if there is no manufacturer out there that will sell devices directly to consumers? What if Motorola is so in bed with Verizon, seeing as how Verizon is their biggest customer, that they only sell LTE handsets to Verizon, which are horribly locked down?

The monopoly players will still price fix and play the same carrier/handset mfgr. monopoly games they've been playing for years. We will still not have any freedom to legally run as root on our endpoint devices. "The man" will still try to control us and keep us locked down in any way possible.

If you could figure out the necessary code to flash to the chip - which wouldn't be easy - yeah, you could reflash the chip via the JTAG port.

This assumes that you could even access the JTAG port. In the "olden days", JTAG was a 300 baud serial port with a DB9 connector. It's still serial but chances are it's either a couple very small pins on the board, or the JTAG port may not even be physically accessible at all on the PCB except in engineering samples that are designed to be reflashed many times.

I wouldn't count on being able to "un-brick" your phone after the eFuse has been tripped, unless you have some highly specialized lab equipment.

(And Jobs could easily force Adobe's hand by requiring third-party platforms support new features by new OS release date. App store apps using said platform will be removed until updated runtimes are available. Thus, native developers have advantages in having apps ready all the time, while those reliant on 3rd party platforms get locked out until the platform is updated. And everyone saves face, except Adobe has to work harder in getting their Flash updates in time with iOS updates...).

That's an interesting idea, but what do you do when someone purchased an app only compatible with iOS 3.1.3 and they want to update to iOS 4? Do you just break all their existing (already purchased) apps? I suppose a lot of apps already break in this manner, but I would be more concerned with customers that may have bought very expensive apps like Omnigraffle ($50) who end up without being able to run it on future iOS versions.

To be fair, the version of Flash that people are installing on their iPads is a hacked version of the Flash Player 10.1 for Android that was just barely released a couple weeks ago. It still has a lot of issues with Flash that requires hover actions, and playing back video at a decent framerate. Most of the complaints I've seen are that it is impossible to scrub video because the controls are too tiny to actually tap on with a finger.

Personally, I don't blame Apple for not including it with the iPad - It wasn't even available when the iPad was released, and it doesn't have the user experience Apple products are known for - trying to watch Flash video that is so small you can't even click on the play or pause button is going to be an exercise in frustration for anyone.

Once Adobe fixes these bugs, I have a feeling we might see something change from Apple, and they may include it with a future release of iOS or Safari.

Cheap, dead-simple "Game rental", buffet-style. Pay per hour, not per game.

I've tried OnLive, and yes, it is simple, but their game rentals are in days, not hours. I wish they had a pay per hour service, but unfortunately right now the game publishers are killing the service before it even started. Every game has a different rental price. For example, Borderlands costs $8.99 for 5 days or $5.99 for a 3 day rental, while Batman: Arkham Asylum is only $6.99 for 5 days or $4.99 for a 3 day rental. The publishers even have arbitrary restrictions like "this game may be played on PC clients but not Mac;" even though the OnLive client runs fine on Mac.

I will give them credit: most games have a free 30 minute demo mode which lets you play 30 minutes for free. This is a great way to try out new games and find out if they suck or not before potentially buying them in a store. I would not buy a game here though - If OnLive goes out of business, and I can't see how they're going to make much profit, to be honest, all my games I've ever purchased are GONE permanently.

When the "1st year free" offer runs out, I'm not going to resubscribe. $50 a year just to be able to pay full retail price to buy games stored in a digital locker that I can't even download to my own PC, and can only play at 720p with compression artifacts? No thanks.

... they could provide their games on bootable Linux discs. No install needed, no patches possible, full control over the player's experience, with the added bonus of being able run the games in Linux. Just a dream? Also no need to update DirectX.

This would never work because of the myriad hardware/driver configurations necessary to support, and distribution rights for chipset, graphics, and sound drivers. Even if they could produce the magic Linux boot CD that would work on every gaming PC made for the last 15 years, on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, and any other graphics card known to man, Nvidia would still go after them for distributing Nvidia copyrighted software without the rights.

Nonsense. First, Blizzard already has the real name associated with an account. If they want, they can already do all that data-mining you're so concerned about. The publishing of the RealID names on the forum are completely unrelated to this.

You're right, but one thing you haven't thought of is that up until now, they have never had a way to map a social network of real life friends, or friends that play multiple games together. Just because your character friended a good healer that kept their group alive didn't mean they had a real world connection. But now, with Real ID, in order to map your social network, you have to know your friend's email address. This mapping persists across characters and even realms (servers). In other words, Blizzard wants to be the next Facebook for gamers. They've already announced the next Battle.net will have targeted ads within the loading screens. This is just the first step in Activision destroying the Blizzard franchise by milking it for all it is worth.

I knew Bobby Kotick would destroy Blizzard, and it looks like it has just begun. I play games to escape reality, not to get griefed in real life because I pissed someone off in a PuG (pick-up group). Being anonymous on the Internet is important, because even if you aren't a troll or an asshole, there are a lot of trolls and assholes out there that might want to make you into a target for abuse. Especially if you are female or different in some way (gay, perhaps).

The first time a person gets ganked in real life after forum combat, you will know that Activision/Blizzard is a soulless corporation that cares more about profits than the safety of their customers.

I'll give you a pass on that one, even though it's completely wrong, but here's one he can't wriggle out of by blaming Bush: ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

All he has to do is sign an executive order. That's it. Nothing else. Doesn't need Congress's approval, doesn't need the help of anyone else in the Executive branch. He just needs to write the order and sign it.

He's going to do that, but as a courtesy to the commanding officers in the armed services, he agreed to let the results of a study be published first. You know, sometimes before signing executive orders that make huge HR changes to a large organization, it's a good idea to do some thoughtful analysis and gather data on the impacts of your executive order.

But I guess you'd rather have Bush, the "decider" who acts first and then doesn't bother to think.

It's funny to hear people blame Obama for not fixing the country in only the 18 months he's been in office. As if January 21st, 2009, he should have solved world peace, world hunger, and finished every campaign promise he made.

He's focusing on the big problems first:

- Healthcare - done.
- Financial reform - almost done, although a little too toothless. They had to make too many compromises because of the Republicans.

The smaller stuff we can wait for. Let's get the big problems fixed first.

Ok, now you got me curious- you better link to said forum posts... :-)

Ultimately I think i've rationalized them into two separate non-competing categories, where the Cowon S9 is the superior media device (well, it is!)

You just keep telling yourself that enough times and you'll believe it! Actually you make a very good point. We all do this: "I purchased brand X car so it must be the best available on the market." In any case, it takes a cold, logical person to separate all emotion from purchasing decisions.

(Especially since Apple received a taxpayer bailout - they stole that money IMHO.)

Excuse me what? Did you say Apple got a taxpayer bailout? You should probably back that up with some facts or other data first because I've never heard of it. They have so much cash they do not need any kind of bailout.

Unfortunately, Netflix still doesn't support closed captioning. If it weren't for this one feature, I would say Netflix would easily beat Hulu. Don't underestimate the appeal of closed captioning for the millions of viewers that speak English as their second language.

65 bugs that I won't get patches for in my 1st Generation Ipod Touch. What is the point of paying a premium for hardware, when the control-freak sole arbiter of software patches renders it functionally obsolete long before its useful life has expired?

Yeah, after 3 years you no longer get updates because your hardware is obsolete. Name one other smartphone/media player vendor that still releases updates for their hardware after it's 3 years old.

He was right that the government basically telling BP "Start coughing up without a being found guilty because we said so or we'll might start fining you/killing your licenses" should be illegal. Due process exists, and it should be followed. That's extortion.

Due process my ass. You seriously want to tell thousands of gulf fishermen that they need to hire lawyers, initiate a lawsuit, and fight for their lost wages? With what money are these fishermen going to hire said lawyers? BP has enough lawyers they could tie the lawsuits up for years while these guys starve.

Sometimes extraordinary measures are called for, and frankly I'm glad that the US had the balls to stand up to BP and tell them to cough up money immediately. When someone's livelihood is being irreparably harmed, you don't just tell him to hire an attorney and spend a few years in court.